All posts for the month April, 2013

Verbal Abuse includes screaming, name-calling, teasing, ridiculing, sarcasm and witnessing someone else receive verbal or any type of abuse. Social abuse includes isolating the child, not allowing friends to come over or not allowing the child to visit others. Indirect social abuse occurs when the child chooses to not have friends come over because the child may be embarrassed about home, a parent’s behavior, or it might not be a safe environment to bring other children into and the parents have indirectly communicated this to the children. Mother or father might be passed out on the couch, depressed, angry, or some other handicap that makes it uncomfortable to have outsiders to the family home. Neglect and Abandonment – Are the child’s dependency needs met? Remember the child cannot survive without a caretaker… food, clothing, shelter, medical/dental care, physical nurturing, emotional nurturing, sexual guidance and appropriate information… how to succeed in the world we live in; financial guidance and information, education and occupation guidance, career and life goals. The impact of neglect and abandonment is often harder for people to comprehend. They often express relief at being left alone, felt it toughened them up and they became better people. In some ways it’s true but they didn’t get to feel taken care of or protected and don’t expect to find it in other relationships. Taken from “Adults Abused as Children” by Licia Ginne, LMFT http://www.latherapists.com/articles.html

I …understand how a parent might hit a child – it’s because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself
that you wish you hadn’t. Jodi Picoult

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Abuse: Touching someone’s body without their permission, hitting, punching, pinching, slapping, tickling, pulling hair, hitting with objects, banging the head, so that marks are left on the person…Punching someone to the point of knocking them off their feet, slamming them into walls or hard objects, strangling or choking someone…Intimidating someone with the threat of violence, punching walls or throwing objects. …you might think that because some other member of your family was receiving the blows you are not a victim of physical abuse, but (you were) if the underlying fear is, “When will it be me?” Physical sexual abuse is bodily sexual activity with a child or touching in a sexual way. It includes: intercourse, oral sex, anal sex, an adult masturbating a child or having a child masturbate an adult, sexual hugging, sexual kissing, and sexual touching. Many people who have been molested or incested feel responsible for what happened, feel that they caused it to happen or wanted it to happen. I have also heard clients express acceptance since it was the only kind of attention that they received. You are not responsible and it is not acceptable behavior. A child will not seek out sexual encounters except what may be age-appropriate sex play with other children. It is the adult’s responsibility to set appropriate boundaries and protect the child. Taken from “Adults Abused as Children” by Licia Ginne, LMFT http://www.latherapists.com/articles.html

The consequences of your denial will be with you for a lifetime and will be passed down to the next generation. Break your Silence on Abuse! Patty Rase Hopson

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The purpose of defining abuse is so we all have a common language and so we can fully experience and embrace the depth of the hurt we have suffered. It is not about blaming but lets us understand why we may always feel like someone is blaming us, or out to get us. We have our feelings in a context that makes more sense and gives us options to choose our behaviors and not just always reacting to things. It helps us to understand why we may feel or think the way that we do. We all struggle with understanding and believing in how these behaviors have affected us. From the safety of our lives now we can look back and rethink our experiences. We tend to empower our past experiences — like being a latchkey kid – by saying it toughened us up, that it built our self-confidence or independence. Yet research supports that being left on your own actually causes us to doubt our perceptions, feelings, thoughts and lower self-esteem. Latchkey kids were forced to grow up too quickly and take on too much responsibility, and they were not allowed to be afraid. As you grow up and develop intimate relationships, you may find it is hard to form close relationships. Trust has been broken and there is a fear to depend upon anyone else. A fear of feeling let down and rejected the way you did as kid when no one was around. Taken from “Adults Abused as Children” by Licia Ginne, LMFT http://www.latherapists.com/articles.html

Research on child abuse suggests that religious beliefs can foster, encourage, and justify the abuse of children. When contempt for sex underlies teachings, this creates a breeding ground for abuse. Mary Garden

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The approach of dissolving our image of perfection sounds contrary to our sense of logic about building confidence and esteem. This is because we have the belief that achieving the image of perfection will result in positive happy emotions and feeling confident with our success. We desire to feel these feelings and chase the image of perfection we have attached to them. What we may not be aware of is that achieving our image of success doesn’t effectively change our emotional state. It doesn’t do anything to permanently change the way the voice in our head speaks to us or what we believe about our self. Many times people have achieved their goals only to find themselves still unfulfilled. Your emotional state may briefly change in the euphoria if the immediate success. But the core belief of not being good enough and your long term habit of self rejection in the mind hasn’t been altered. The critical voice in our head is more likely to put a higher goal in front of us to achieve. The second belief to dissolve is that we are inadequate and somehow not good enough. These are the beliefs that create emotions of insecurity and fear. The emotions are not the problem they are just the resulting symptom of negative core beliefs. The “not good enough” image is a construct of our imagination. It is a belief about ourselves created by the mind concluding that we are “not good enough to meet the image of perfection.” A step to changing this belief is to recognize that we the one observing the “self” image. We can not be the “self” image we are looking at. We are the one doing the looking. This means the “self image we create is really a “non self” image. Taken from “Insecurity and Confidence” http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/writings-insecurity.htm

I’m interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice. Clint Eastwood

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Real Self Confidence and Esteem is based in emotion, not a self-image. To build self-confidence and overcome low self-esteem is to change how we feel emotionally about ourselves. To change our emotion requires changing two different core beliefs about self-image. The first core belief is obvious. It is the belief that we are not good enough. It may have a more specific association to how we look, how smart we are, money, or lack of confidence sexually. The second core belief to change is the image of success that we feel we should be. Changing this belief is contrary to logic, but is a must if we are to overcome insecurity and raise our self-esteem. When your mind has an image of success that you “should be” it associates happy emotions with that picture. I call that the image of perfection in our mind. The mind does a comparison between the image of perfection and how you see your self-image currently. The comparison results in judgment and self rejection for not meeting the image of perfection. The self rejection results in feeling unworthy and of low self-esteem. While the image of perfection appears to be a way for us to feel good about ourselves, it is actually causing us to reject ourselves which creates feelings of “not being good enough.” If you were to dissolve the belief that you should fit into the image of perfection you would eliminate the self rejection and feelings of unworthiness that result. Taken from “Insecurity and Confidence” http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/writings-insecurity.htm

A man’s spirit is free, but his pride binds him with chains of suffocation in a prison of his own insecurities. Jeremy Aldana

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Sorry, I didn’t have signal! The second most common lie told by men is over why they didn’t answer their phone. Men are three times as likely to lie as women, a new study has found (HushHush.com). And the average man lies three times every single day – or more than 1,000 times each year. In comparison, the study found that the average woman lies just once each day. The survey of 2,531 adults across the UK shows that we are a nation of liars, with just five per cent of respondents saying that they told the truth ‘at all times’. The majority, 52 per cent, of men said that they lied three times a day on average; whilst one in seven, 14 per cent, said that they lied more than five times each day on average. In contrast, almost three fifths of women, 57 per cent, said they lied once each day on average making this the most common response, with just 17 per cent going as far as to say they lied three times per day. When asked ‘What lie do you most regularly tell?’, the survey found that women are most likely to lie about their emotions, with 27 per cent admitting that their most regular lie was ‘I’m fine’. The most common lie men tell, with 45 per cent admitting to doing so most regularly, was that they’d done something they were supposed to have done but hadn’t. By Katy Winter http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2286671/Yes-darling-Ive-Im-sorry-I-didnt-signal-The-common-lies-men-tell.html

The liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else. George Bernard Shaw

One of the reasons for this jealousy is insecurity. A man may be paired with a very beautiful woman and feel that he is not quite handsome enough to be with her. The male may feel that she’ll dump him for somebody else. Even if he feels, quote, unquote “handsome enough”, every time she smiles and looks at somebody else-he will still feel insecure about himself and his relationship with his partner. Insecurities can be the heart and soul of every jealousy: insecurity about appearance, relationship status and such. Through such feelings, comes a loss of trust, faith-never mind self-esteem. In the vast majority of all cases, the jealousy is simply not warranted. But say that to an insecure man. First, he’ll deny it. But when it becomes very apparent, he’ll say that she probably is cheating on him-wants another man. You may stand there, in deep consternation and befuddlement over these illusory jealousies. But he will still feel jealous, and may not be able to stop it. The wife or girlfriend in question ends up feeling insecure over her own relationship. She feels restricted or under a tight leash because she may have a number of male friends and her male partner cannot handle it. Jealousies have torn apart many a relationship over the years. It verges on and has easily crossed the lines of paranoia and obsessive behavior. By bukisa.com http://www.modernghana.com/lifestyle/2170/16/why-are-men-so-jealous.html

A woman never forgets the men she could have had; a man, the women he couldn’t. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings